There ought to be a law against Henry coming around…

Weird that I have never read anyone point out that Bob Dylan's ”Ballad of a Thin Man” is something of an homage to Berrymans Dream Songs.

Is it too obvious of a point? Anyway Id be interested to know if theres any mention of this anywhere?

Neon Night Mic AWP Offsite Reading Hosted by [neonpajamas] Nicky Beer Alina Pleskova C.T. Salazar Johannes Goransson David Wojciechowski Jon Woodward Michael Martone Katie Jean Shinkle Matt Bell Aaron Burch Chen Chen Henry Goldkamp David Simmons Jose Hernandez Diaz Alina Stefanescu Kenyatta Rogers @ Old Major 900 S. Carey St. Batimore Wednesday, March 4 Doors: 6:00pm Readings: 7:00pm-10:00pm

Might be a couple more additions to the lineup 🤫 but here's what we have in store for Wednesday! Starting AWP on a high note

New books from Action Books coming this spring!

Two Poems by Jaime Saenz (trans Schluter/Dodson) and Call the Necromancer by Leia Penina Wilson.

The Saenz includes the long poems The Cold and Death at the Very Touch. Both visionary masterpieces.

I love her reading of Bruno K Öijer's poem.

Stockroom Picks presents: Candice Wuehle (Curated by Miharu Yano) • Action Books Candice Wuehle is the author of the novels ULTRANATURAL (University of Iowa Press, 2026) and MONARCH (Soft Skull, 2022), named a Best Book of 2022 by NPR, SPIN!, Lambda Literary, Crime Reads, and Nylo...

actionbooks.org/2026/02/stoc...

"Memory is mortal. Some evenings, Billie Holiday lays her sick rose in my ears."

- Antonio Gamoneda

(trans. Hedeen/Nunez)

Out on a Limb: On Ghayath Almadhoun’s "I Have Brought You a Severed Hand" - Cleveland Review of Books Is the hand being proffered in the spirit of a gift, or is it evidence, rather, of something damning and unnamed?

"Is home still home if it reeks of carnage and displacement? Inanimate objects and architectural structures suffer from a condition of excess, of being too much themselves, as if caught in a retributive feedback loop: water chokes, roads lose their way home..."

clereviewofbooks.com/ghayath-alma...

"Almadhoun revealingly writes, “although my passport is fake, my poems are real.” Literature, for him, is thicker than the falsehoods of nationality, the vacuous mendacity of borders; it is as solid as Palestine, “as obvious as occupation,” and as real... as the severed hand that he offers, to us."

Out on a Limb: On Ghayath Almadhoun’s "I Have Brought You a Severed Hand" - Cleveland Review of Books Is the hand being proffered in the spirit of a gift, or is it evidence, rather, of something damning and unnamed?

"Almadhoun, formed in the crucible of diaspora and residing now between Stockholm and Berlin, is more an Aimé Césaire refreshed for an age of post-9/11 neoliberalism and identity politics."
- Alex Tan on Ghayath Almadhoun's I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
clereviewofbooks.com/ghayath-alma...

"The voice in the poem is not your friend."
- Sean Bonney

I'll send you a pdf.

I did write a book which was the diary of me reading Norén's diary...

Because it's Valentine's

Hating love
Roque Dalton

Without your hands my heart
is the enemy in my chest.

I do have it thanks!

@500songspodcast.bsky.social - here's an article I wrote about the podcast.

The Art of Mimicry: The History of Rock n' Roll or Any Other Art Form Lately I’ve been obsessed with a podcast called “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” created and hosted by Andrew Hickey.

I wrote a substack post about the superb podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" and Bob Dylan, genius, corruption, mimicry: open.substack.com/pub/johannes...

Abismos de Pasión (1954) Gone several years, the brooding Alejandro returns to the hacienda of his foster sister, Catalina, whom he loves, to find her married to the wealthy and effete Eduardo. Director: Luis Buñuel. Stars...

rarefilmm.com/2017/07/abis...

Wuthering Heights? A blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row, pushing mediocre actors & hyperbolic montage to the max, before blasting triumphantly into the stratosphere, Luis Bunuel's 1954 Mexican version is a true surrealist classic.

The wheel upon which Minnesota broke them

A couple of weeks ago Joyelle went to a Moestrup reading in Berlin and sent me this photo from the event. Apparently quite an amazing reading. Complete with blood prints. Moestrup is a leading Danish poet and - like @olgaravn.bsky.social - associated with "the witch school".

The "magical machines" could be seen as "constraints: but James Pate - in a forthcoming review in Notre Dame Review - argues that this "magic" has more in common with Blake than US conceptualism. There's an occult, bodily and emotional quality to these poems.

Contrary to the article I read in Bookforum, the avant-garde is not a US-only avant-garde, is not unified - and that's its strength. If you want to find out about the best new movements and transformations of poetry, you better not be looking for "an" avant-garde, and you better look to translation.

Great to see a lot of groundbreaking new work in translation from the Scandinavian countries. This morning Im reading Mette Moestrup’s brilliant To the Most Beautiful (trans Ögaard-Jensen, @coimpress.bsky.social ) which uses nine different formal system (”magical machines”) to engage with Beauty.

ICE AGENTS ARE FOLLOWING OBSERVERS TO THEIR HOMES. THEY ARE DOING THE EXACT SHIT JOHNSON SAYS IS INTOLERABLE!

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

So much breathing...

YouTube video by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Jubilee Street - Live in Copenhagen

Also, the little black book in this poem is probably the little black book Nick Cave sings about in "Jubilee Street". I'm always reacting/deforming pop songs in my poems bc I listen to music when I write: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf_z...

I also thought of the haiku because of a time I read with a Japanese poet in Tokyo, he had written "radioactive haikus" after Fukushima. Some traditionalists opposed the work bc it was super long and messy but consisted of a swarm of "haikus" and I feel like maybe my poem does something similar.

Had a discussion about this yesterday so I'm posting a link to it again. And to @neonpajamas.bsky.social 's prompts. I think I called it a "haiku" bc of the snow:

"The poems

which maybe at first were

written in a crystal ink

were meant to protect me

against the snow’s beautiful gestures"

I don't know.

Or the other way around. Eva Kristina Olsson writes books based on her film scripts that fail to get financed. Because poetry is cheap!

www.visiblebinary.com/eva-kristina...